Advertisement

Advertisement

Forum: Reinventing the wheel – A solution to the not-invented-here syndrome

By JOHN NICHOLSON

THE OTHER day I heard again that well-worn cliche that ‘we need to avoid
reinventing the wheel’. Naturally I agreed with the person who said it.
After all, it is axiomatic that we don’t want to go around reinventing the
wheel, isn’t it? But when I thought about it, I was not so sure. Of course,
there is a superficial attraction in being so efficient that any gadget,
the wheel included, is invented only once. But science and technology just
aren’t like that. Practically everything has been invented more than once,
including television, motor cars and the electric light bulb; even, no doubt,
the wheel itself.

Science and technology, not to mention human civilisation, reach a point
at which existing knowledge and a particular need indicate a particular
opportunity. Under such circumstances, a number of creative thinkers tend
to make the small but necessary step of invention at more or less the same
time. The result is several wheels invented in close succession. In all
probability, as gauged by strict chronology, some wheels must be the result
of reinvention.

A key feature of the process of reinvention is that several people,
as opposed to only one, have gone through the creative act. And having done
so, they each have two important attributes: experience of creativity and
enthusiasm for their original invention. Both are vital for continuing technical
innovation. The development of any innovation in most organisations is usually
achieved through the efforts of a ‘product champion’ who cares enough about
an invention to see it through to production. There is nothing more motivating
than the invention being one’s own. ‘Not-invented-here’ is a well-known
reason for inaction on a development project and, hence, failure to exploit
a particular idea.

Repeated in-house invention of wheels by every company may be inefficient,
as assessed by some niggardly rationalistic method of accounting, but would
be more than made up for by the commitment and enthusiasm of the inventors.
If we did allow more people to reinvent the wheel, there would almost certainly
be more innovative uses found for the wheel itself.

Advertisement

We need to look, too, at the kind of activities we defend by saying
that we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. In science, there are usually
two: extensive consultation of the prior literature before beginning any
practical work and collaboration between companies and universities in precompetitive
research. But the reality is that both activities are very different from
carrying out the main creative task. The danger with overemphasising these
aspects of technical work is that we are so anxious to avoid reinventing
the wheel that we end up not inventing it at all.

Overall, I drew two conclusions from my thoughts on this subject. First,
I don’t think reinvention is such a bad thing because of the commitment
to innovation that it would spin off. And secondly, as Sam Goldwyn once
remarked, I think it is about time that we had some new cliches.

John Nicholson is a principal scientific officer in a Civil Service
laboratory.